Stories by Mark Renfree

Co-Winner: Newlink – OneNewl1nk OneNewl1nk’s core objective is to achieve internal collaboration and regional alignment in order to become a truly integrated company. To do so, the company embarked on a journey to maximize its… Continued

Winner: Hotwire – Meet Swivelfly When the Swivelfly team first approached Hotwire, they had a vision and business model in mind to disrupt and forever change the workspace furnishing industry. Bruce Paul, Swivelfly’s CEO, recognized… Continued

Working outside of the limitations of smartphone-captured footage, communicators can now stream professional-quality video directly to Twitter. While smartphone video has its place within Periscope and on platforms like Snapchat, brands now have the ability to widen their approach to streaming.

As the company tries to focus on everything live—from streaming on Periscope to following breaking news and events—savvy users will notice a blending of old and new in the new feature. Explore takes two tools Twitter created for compiling essentially separate conversations and blends them together. Long-time Twitter users will see pieces of the now defunct “Discover” feature—suggested account and trending topics—coexisting alongside Moments’ signature highlights.

Today’s SEO is a complex stew of content, links, site performance, user experience and a bunch of other variables pushed to perform in a wide array of environments. But for all the considerations that go into developing a successful SEO strategy, it’s important to remember that the driving force behind SEO is people. At its core, SEO is just a machine that’s trying to keep up with humans’ search expectations by monitoring and emulating their behaviors. Keywords are one of the ways that search engines do this.

Chicago joined several cities and states across the country in halting business with Wells Fargo. In response to the decision, Wells Fargo released a statement that highlighted the good the company does in the community. Will focusing on the money it put back into the city do enough to stem the negativity surrounding the brand?

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Snapchat must be feeling pretty buttered up. In the past week Facebook launched two additions to its messaging suite that more or less clone Snapchat’s most popular features. Facebook’s Messenger app launched a small test run of “Messenger Day,” which lets users send customized photos and videos that disappear in a day, similar to Snapchat Stories. And WhatsApp users can now edit photos and video with text overlays of multiple colors, emojis and custom drawings.

While Twitter Moments aren’t new to the platform, it’s taken some time for average users to get their hands on the feature. When Moments hit the scene, it was a highly regulated and carefully aggregated stream of content. Dedicated staff and Twitter’s content partners patched together tweets, images and Vines to tell important and trending stories in a more concise way than sifting through the platform’s deluge of content. Now, all Twitter users can create Moments to share with the world.

Google just put more brains behind Analytics’ considerable brawn. Babak Pahlavan, senior director of measurement & analytics at Google, unveiled a variety of new features and beta tests for the search giant’s measurement platform at SMX East in New York City.

Snapchat is taking its first step out of the digital world and trying its luck in the hardware space, according to a blog post on the company’s website. Snapchat’s newest product, dubbed “Spectacles,” is a pair of sunglasses with a built-in camera that can shoot short videos and upload them directly to Snapchat.